


the sky stopped, no less

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Books, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Literary References & Allusions, Polyamory, Romance, Slice of Life, Time Skips, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-02
Updated: 2018-02-02
Packaged: 2019-03-12 20:19:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13554822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: Clara wasn't exactly expecting the Doctor to follow up on his suggestion to put Clara in contact with Professor Song. But, then, Clara wasn't exactly expecting to have so much in common with River.A romance across time, space and books.





	the sky stopped, no less

**Author's Note:**

> For Aralis, to go along with this [moodboard](https://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/169547015857/time-spent-reading-like-time-spent-loving) for the 2017 River Song Secret Santa. Yes, I forgot to post it here.
> 
> Title from the song "Les yeux au ciel" by Barbara Carlotti.

“Time spent reading, like time spent loving, increases our lifetime.”

― Daniel Pennac,  _Reads like a novel_

 

 

__

It starts about a week into the preparations for her very first year as a teacher. Clara manages to convince herself this is less for her own distraction and more for conveying a sense of reality to classes about a bunch of dead people who were telling to children  _their_  story, but in dead words plucked from dead times.

“Mary Shelley? Again?” the Doctor squawks, cleaning the console buttons, although from her perspective it looks like he’s playing with them. “Honestly, I don’t know if I want to.”

Clara plants her fist on her hip cocked. She is standing in the middle of the TARDIS entrance, where she found her requests are most commanding.

“Oh, do you have a beef with her too?”

“No!” he cries, too loud to be convincing. “No. Time travel to the times of birth of certain genres is tricky.”

She wants to answer fiction and reality don’t interlock like that, but she doesn’t need to encourage him to lapse into a didactic mood when she herself is trying to get away from it for a day.

“So, you’re saying you don’t have the skills to land around the time science fiction was born.”

He mumbles a string of words under his breath that sounds as if he is mocking someone else. Worse than kids, truly.

“What was that?” she curtly asks.

She doesn’t expect him to straighten like one of said kids and answer:

“You sound like River.”

Clara blinks, taken by surprise.

They don’t talk about Trenzalore or River. He would, on occasions, slip anecdotes about daring escapes performed with Pr. Song. But of the woman who had most likely saved them that day on Trenzalore, that dead woman who had been his wife and whom he referred to as “an ex”, nothing.

“River” is the one who isn’t a novel character, the one with a body that had been loved and broken, the one with tears and laughter for them, even in death, the one who had whispered into Clara’s ear although she couldn’t even feel the touch of a breath.

Often, Clara wanted to ask about River, not Pr. Song. She knew the cost of breaching loss for curiosity. She settled for glimpses of the wonderful life of Pr. Song.

Carefully, Clara takes a step closer to the Doctor.

“Your River, you mean?”

“ _My_  River, yeah.” He seems to chew on something for a while, jaws set, bent on the console. Clara lets him. “Books were kind of her thing. I could hook you two up.”

Clara breathes a small, hazed,  _thank you._

She stops thinking about it after they fail to land anywhere near the 19th century, Earth, and become busy with playing diplomats between four different alien species with a malfunctioning translation matrix. But, the day after, a dashing swashbuckler in the shape of a ghost turns up on her doorstep.

Brighter and taller that anything Clara remembers.  

“Doctor River Song. Archaeologist,” the late Doctor’s wife purrs, extending a gloved hand in Clara’s direction. Clara takes it, jolts of delight coursing her body when she senses the reality of the ghost. “I’ve been told you needed a lift to proper time travelling adventures.”

That is cheesy. But Clara can’t pretend it isn’t working: a flirty blonde wearing fiery eyes, thigh boots and a sword invited her for a literary date.

 

***

 

They do pay a visit to Mary Shelley. Eventually. After River settles a few scores with space bandits. Hence the outfit.

The Doctor is right in claiming books are kind of River’s thing. The Doctor has a tendency to treat the writers like good old pals of his who happen to be geniuses at their hobby, which annoys Clara to no ends at times. River loves books like the kid who devoured stories between classes – in River’s case, while in detention - legs crossed, stockings grey with dust.

Clara doesn’t learn about prison later, but at that point she has witnessed River perform so many illegal acts, some of them more likely to land her a presidential seat in half the galaxy than a cell in a Sontaran jail, that the only discussion left for them is the shifting nature of laws across time and space. For all Clara knows, River could have been sentenced to life for smuggling cheese on Betazoid-4.

But River still grows quiet when Clara jokes about it.

Alexandre Dumas. Murasaki Shikibu. Roal Dahl. Daphne du Maurier. They pay a visit to many writers and thinkers. From Earth and beyond. From planets whose civilization is so far removed from anything Clara could have dreamed of that Clara needs weeks to process how similar their work of fiction is to their Earth counterparts’. People are people. Everywhere. River hands her books she may enjoy and once Clara is finished and has sufficiently raved about them, they drop by the house of the three-headed being who penned it.

River’s knowledge of Earth literary corpus is perplexing; a fair amount of children’s and teens’ literature from the late 20thcentury, a wide range of historical and anthropological works from all of humans’ academic history it seems, disparate fictional and non-fictional literature from very specific time period on Earth and, here and there, one book by Maya Angelou, some of Sappho’s poetry and the next Aki Shimazaki saga. She isn’t up-to-date with the current literary life on Earth, unsurprisingly, and her classics seem to have been assimilated through summaries rather than academic syllabus.

Clara quickly understands this is to do with the vastness of the Professor’s life, who, by her own admission, is quite the 51stcentury gal, and Clara takes great pleasure and pride introducing authors and classics or obscure works to her. River is a fast reader, like the Doctor. Except she wouldn’t shun in-depth discussion of whatever landed in her hands.

Her first intuition is never to grab her vortex manipulator and hop back to meet the author to ask about a particular plot point or punctuation sign. Clara and River theorise and analyse the words, not always seriously, sometimes while robbing an intergalactic vault to retrieve a priceless last edition, sometimes over wine in the back of River’s multiple gardens.

Clara has someone to talk literature with, someone who knows of the consuming chaos of travelling with the Doctor. It anchors her for a while, enough for her to grow confident in the life she has on Earth, with her students and bills, her apartment she doesn’t like, her fling with the woman from the coffee shop.

For a while.

“How does it feel to be the inspiration for Pallas Athena though?” Clara tries.

 

***

 

When the Doctor regenerates, Clara becomes protective of River. More secretive. 

Before, the Doctor had been aware of their “live intergalactic extra-temporal extra-marital book club” as he calls it, but showed no particular interest in probing the exact content of their expeditions. Without a word, after Christmas, his attitude toward River changed, loving but with a tenderness that suggested he had not seen her in a long time. A very long time. Not at all anymore.

So Clara became more mindful of River.

She picks for her books that she suspects might help with whatever River is experiencing. River rarely talks about herself, but the places she’s been, the people she smiles to, the cries she lets out in the heart of battle tell more about her inner life than any confession she willingly makes to Clara.

River is lonely. River is trapped. River loves her parents more than anything. River loves her freedom more than her parents. River has night terrors. River has died a few times before.

There are books for that and Clara provides.

River likes women too. River likes anyone, really, and Clara has yet to understand the charm of kissing someone who is a giant beetle, despite River’s claims of Yu being one of the highest ranking princes of the Illian Empire. But River really likes women. And Clara likes them too.

It’s a piece of information always at the back of Clara’s mind although she does nothing with it for a while.

Her life is a mess, between hiding the Doctor from Danny and shielding Danny from the Doctor. She doesn’t have time for River during that period.

River still sends her books and Clara can swear a few of her Russian literature disappeared from her shelves.

Clara loses Danny. River is there. Her books at least, because Clara doesn’t actively seek her out while she’s mourning. River sends her a brand new first edition of  _The Lord of the Rings_  and Clara cries between the pages and the losses and when she’s finished wrecking the specimen, she feels she made a first step out of death.

On their first literary date after Danny’s passing, they have tea with Marguerite Yourcenar in her a garden at Petite Plaisance and Clara kisses River under the wines.

River tastes like death and for half a breath, it seems it might choke Clara, but Clara has been breathing it for so long now, she’s addicted to its perfume. River’s lips are soft on her lips, on her fingers, on her skin.

River pulls back, Clara gasping at the loss of contact and at the very vision of River, bathed in the late-afternoon Maine sunlight. Her ancient eyes, so different from the Doctor’s, are smiling.  

“Now, that’s an entry for my diary.”

“Please don’t tell me you’ve documented every one of our conversations together because there are late-night analyses of Shakespeare I am not proud of.”

“You are terrible. I know you have a cupboard full of diaries.

“Going through my drawers?”

“Dear, last time you sent me to retrieve your backpack, I nearly died crushed under a tumbling tower of notebooks.”

Clara laughs. This feels too normal. Not like everything is back to where it’s supposed to be. But it feels like there is ground beneath her feet.

River trails down from her neck to catch her hand.

“Can I interest you in elaborating on the romantic mood at the highest restaurant in the universe?”

She would like to think she starts a thing with River there, but they shared, through books, in the past few years, every emotion, every comfort, every recovery, every joke and every desire. It started when River was dead and Clara a mystery.  

 

***

 

Clara doesn’t feel anything much anymore. Sometimes, she pretends she can feel the sting of the tattoo on her neck.

But she can feel the cold of the night and the sand beneath her. It’s enough.

She didn’t see River as often as she would have wanted in the last two years. She has an inkling that River could have helped with her slow unravelling. Or slow-clapped: River is the one a mile up in the air, guiding a precarious skeleton of a microlight through the night. It looks like the aircraft is flying her rather than the contrary.

The uncertainty comforts her. Like her situation, nothing about them is permanent. Clara lost a good deal of the books River had given her when she died in the trap street. And River never seems to invite her to the same home. She has safe-houses, apparently, all across the galaxy, but Clara suspects they are trophy rooms more than personal libraries. The books don’t matter as much as they used to be, now. It fills her with melancholy, but, then, she’s dead.

She remembers thinking River seemed like she was made of the same matter as books; dead trees, dead skin, dead words. The price to pay to become a story.

But River never was a story. Clara was a teacher a lifetime ago, but she never shook off her habit of dissecting books. River isn’t a story because she is narration itself. She is telling stories about herself and the process of telling encompasses her. That’s what Clara could never quite get.

Clara doesn’t mind that she is a point in River’s life and River the tip of a pen that whirls around, sometimes passing her. And vice versa.

Clara smiles. The air is harsh against her cheeks and if her body could undergo any change, she would need gallons of moisturizer. The moonrise on Babel-7 is worth it, as is River skirting the edge of the clouds in her strange plane.

She is a monument to beauty and freedom, erected at this very moment for her only, shredding the softness of the vapour in billows around. The chemicals of the lake before her shimmer upon reacting with the white mist. It looks like the surface of the lake is on fire, if fire could render such mat colours. Violets and greens, reds and blues. And suddenly River cleaves the painting, all black in her flying leathers, her silent glide cutting the night.

It’s a bit cliché, Clara reflects. The dark woods and sand, white moon and mist, and the lake like a palette.

River is not paying attention to the landscape; she loops the loop and caresses the surface of the water, disturbing the vapoury curls above. She flies as fast as she reads, as voraciously and irrationally, with gaps and tricks. One instant, she disappears into the mist and Clara feels she will disappear forever. The feeling is sharp as a page, and as comforting.

Permanence, at this point in Clara’s existence, means death, means looping the loop, means coming back to trap street.

Clara is technically stuck one second before forever. River will die. Clara doesn’t even know how or where or when. It doesn’t matter. She knows River tamed time enough for forever to be crammed into her life.  The two of them are short on time, but never on life.

“How does life feel like at the other end of forever?” Clara calls from her spot on the beach.

“Right back at you”, River shouts, soaring toward the moon at full speed until gravity catches up with her and the aircraft stops in air, suspended for a second before it dips back into the joyful chaos of the mist.

Tonight, Clara is pretty sure she’s asking River to be her wife.


End file.
